2. The Day The Clown Cried (1972)
A film in such bad taste, it has never been released, The Day The Clown features Jerry Lewis as a clown who leads children into the gas chambers like the pied piper. No wonder we have never seen it! Helmut (Jerry Lewis) is a long past it circus clown who is trading on his former glory when he was a well respected performer. He gets into trouble with the Gestapo for drunkenly mocking Adolf Hitler and is thrown into a concentration camp where he tries to impress his fellow inmates by doing a clown routine. They laugh at him and beat him up. But wait! The Jewish children on the other side of the fence find Helmut hilarious. The camp commandant is deeply unimpressed with Helmut fraternising with Jews as it is camp policy to segregate people. Helmut, deeply touched by the children's plight, refuses to stop performing and gets beaten up and chucked in solitary. However, the authorities see a use for him. He is to accompany children to Auschwitz to keep them entertained during the journey and lead them to the gas chamber. Helmut is exceedingly distressed by the children's fate and goes into the 'showers' with them to entertain them. The movie ends as the children are laughing at Helmut's antics. The film probably had a sincere and heartfelt message to convey but it is apparently hidden among all the schmaltz. Everyone who has seen the film describes it as 'misplaced'. Harry Shearer said: With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" that's all you can say". (wikipedia) In 2013, Jerry Lewis was quizzed about the film and he said it will never see the light of day because he is embarrassed and ashamed of the film and it is 'bad, bad, bad'. Presumably, he knows that clowns + Holocaust do not good bedfellows make. I cannot make a personal claim about this film as I have never seen it but the general consensus of people who have seen it is that it is a masterclass in how to make a bad taste movie.